elementgirl031's Art Book

[EARLY PRIDE] Sketch: Bond + Short Story

We used to be friends.

That, I thought, as I strode around our longtime school campus, was quite an understatement. Friends didn't cover it; we were best friends since first grade. For the entire time I had studied in this school, she was there.

Till ninth grade, we were only casual girls who would rather stand at the sidelines, talking, looking over at everyone who we thought don't experience enough. The carefree days when we'd rather sit on one of those orange lunch tables on the gym stage, chatting whatnot till we either leave for the library or line up for the next period . . .

Those are all in the innocent past for now.

As of this day, I was standing and walking around the school for my last year in junior high. Tenth grade. Jeez. Even those two words alone carried a wind of unnecessary stress and authority. And yet here we are, sporting those two saddled feelings ourselves.

Not that I'm a rebellious student myself. I'm quite the type to follow the rules often, actually. Maybe it's because I'm one of those above-average guys who doesn't like attracting too much attention — authority, that is. I don't like it.

That was exactly what I came here for, unfortunately.

We used to be friends. We. Not I, not you — we, a collective pronoun. Now that's one reason to hate authority; it's the task of one unity, not one person alone.

Relationships. Group projects. Stage plays. Professional animations. Debates, props making, movie production, group oral comm, performance tasks . . . heck, even a class-wide cheating plan. It was never the work of one person, everyone in the team always has at least one task to contribute to the entire thing.

Authority is but a minuscule thing to take care of in the face of cooperation. Authority is not anything to be mindful of in the presence of independence and autonomy, in the souls of the patriots fighting for nationalism, in the face of credible sovereignty.

Did I mention relationships?

"Avie. Hey. You're blanking out, like whenever you get an episode."

I blinked to see the girl in front of me. She's rather plump (and yet to my chagrin, taller than I am), and of course us being here for the first day of school, she was also wearing her school uniform. That familiar ubiquitous red hairband on her dark head was what made me recognize her.

"Mar, come on," I said with a small laugh. "Don't worry. It's not an episode."

"Tell you what, I wouldn't be too energetic today, either," Mar joked. "First day of school. Who wouldn't be blanked out?"

I forced out a laugh. It wasn't that she wasn't funny; I just couldn't get myself to loosen up. "Well, I'm excited," I commented.

She gave me one of those looks — the one she gives whenever she senses a dissonance between my voice and my statement. "And yet you just said that with such a monotonous tone," she noticed aloud.

"Don't mind it." I tried to conceal it with a small smile. "I was just tired the night before. I didn't sleep too well." Well, to be fair, it was the truth. I didn't have as much insomnia attacks as before, but they're still there.

"Didn't sleep much?" Now Mar was starting to approach me slowly, her dark eyes peering into mine. (Pretty much almost every Filipino have the same eye color.) "Sure, I could see that. And then again, neither did I — "

"Wait, what?"

Mar blinked, having just realized what she said. She ended up looking sideways: "Y-yea. I'm sorry."